July 2008 Archive

Cary Grant’s Suit

Granta:

North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit.

I guess I never thought about it like that before. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Conditions of Receptivity

Dr. Sinthome:

At what point do certain statements, certain declarations, certain assertions, take on the capacity to resonate and produce effects in a receiver? What are the conditions for the possibility of being heard? … I became capable of receiving a message where before I was not. But how and under what conditions? Likewise, under what conditions do certain political positions and declarations begin to resonate within the social field? This question is at the very heart of social change and is not secondary or ancillary to questions of critique. For without adequately answering these questions, adequate strategies of producing change cannot be formulated. However, a glance at the history of political transformations also seems to indicate that while these shifts are cultural in character, they also seem to involve material transformations that problematize the cultural sphere, calling for new institutions, new group formations, new ways of feeling, new subjectivities, and new ways of living.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

John Gruber is a Jerk

So the story goes that Dan Lyons, the guy who writes Fake Steve Jobs, has decided to stop. He made the mistake of talking about why he stopped in an interview:

The truth is simply this. I began hearing a few months ago that Steve Jobs was very sick. I wasn’t sure if these rumors were true or not. Then I saw how he looked at WWDC and it was like having the wind knocked out of me. I just couldn’t carry on. I hope and pray that he’s not sick. But for now I just can’t carry on with the Fake Steve character.

Rather than accept that it is possible and probable that Steve Jobs is sick, or at least that Lyons believes he is, Gruber over at Daring Fireball decides to attack Lyons as a two-faced Newsweek whore. Gruber accuses Lyons of a deceptive attempt to clear the way for new Apple freebies, implying that he’ll get less access to Apple products because of his bad behavior as Fake Steve Jobs.

I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that continuing the Fake Steve blog might have an adverse affect on the amount of access to new products Apple will grant to Lyons and Newsweek. Levy, at least while at Newsweek, was often seeded with new products a few weeks in advance of release, in the same rarified air as Walt Mossberg and David Pogue. Even with Fake Steve on ice, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of access Apple gives to Lyons at Newsweek.

Lyons used to be linked in Daring Fireball quite often, even without mention of lenses, typography or Stanley Kubrick. It’s a mystery to me why Gruber is attacking him now but something tells me it has to do with the possibility of a Steve Jobs illness. That possibility has initiated Gruber’s Apple apologist instincts and anyone who mentions it is getting the full brunt of his unfocused rage.

Of course, Lyon’s FSJ is a mini American masterpiece. A satire that mocks the self-obsessed aestheticism and infantile streaks of aggression from the faux bon vivants that seem to rule the day. My only critique would be that a focus on Steve Jobs becomes personal rather quickly and perhaps there are more deserving targets of satire. If Montesquieu has taught us anything, it may be best to reveal the target of your attack in implication only. Or in the title of your post.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Deflated Protest

A green protester super glued himself to Gordon Brown for some reason. Something about climate change not getting enough attention. Luckily protesters are seen as ritual now:

“He was just grinning about it. He didn’t seem to take me seriously.”… In an audio recording of the protest, the Prime Minister can be heard laughing as the stunt began… After the incident he was allowed to stay in Downing Street for 40 minutes, he said.

The problem could be his gimmicky pointless protest or it could be another sign that civil protest has lost its power.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

New Liner Notes by David Bowie

The increasingly reclusive David Bowie has written some interesting liner notes for some of his favorite songs.

For this CD compilation I’ve selected 12 of my songs that I don’t seem to tire of. Few of them are well known, but many of them are still sung at my concerts. Usually by me. I’ll start off with the hit…

I had a whole wad of words that I had been writing all day. I had felt distanced and unsteady all evening, something settling in my mind. It’s possible that I may have smoked something in my Bewlay pipe. I distinctly remember a sense of emotional invasion.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Has the “Surge” in Iraq Worked?

Immanuel Wallerstein writing for the Monthly Review:

I could go on—about Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, the Gulf states. The fact is that the United States is decidedly weaker everywhere in the Middle East in the eighteen months since the surge began. Has it not been in part, maybe in large part, precisely because of the surge? The Middle East today is like a large geopolitical balloon. If you squeeze it at one point, the air will simply displace itself to another point. And the balloon is getting more fragile all the time. It is on the verge of bursting.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

America’s Middle Class Can’t Take Much More Punishment

Matt Taibbi writing for Rolling Stone:

Our economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers — that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence — immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.

(Via I cite.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Ridgemont Typologies

Great little consumer series.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Nobody’s A Critic

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The word criticism has its root in the Greek word krinein, which means — in its most original sense — to divide or separate. It’s about sorting things out and making distinctions. Criticism is thus about doing something that is, in this era, almost impossible to do. It is difficult simply to keep up with the vast global cultural output, let alone to make determinations and judgments.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

The “Far Left” is the Main Stream

Daily Kos has some interesting poll figures indicating that the majority of Americans are actually much further to the left than one would otherwise suspect. Obviously poll figures are hardly sacrosanct, but I think they lend some due credence to the suspicion that the notion of the “middle-class moderate” majority is essentially a fantasy discourse propagated by the media and political elite.

We reflect the majority opinion of this country on pretty much every issue, yet the media continues to pretend that we’re the far left, the lunatic fringe. They’re still unwilling to admit the obvious…we are the mainstream.

But it’s not just the media. The idea that the majority of Americans are moderate in the apolitical sense is a groundless ideological assertion that has successfully propagated itself at nearly every level of social consciousness, such that any evidence that contradicts it is read as being partisan.

Obviously, it would be very discomforting for the Right to find out how little support their ideas actually have amongst the majority of Americans, but it seems that they are aware of this, which is why (to borrow a concept from Adam Kotsko) there is and always has been a clear asymmetry in relation to the truth between the Left and the Right: to take an example from this election year, the notion that John McCain is a warmonger is not actually far from the truth, given the innumerable quips he has made about killing Iranians, whereas the notion that Barack Obama is a Communist secret Muslim is simply a paranoid racist fantasy.

Unless you take most people to be less intelligent than yourself, in which case you are most likely an asshole, it really shouldn’t be surprising at all that most Americans (and most people in general) are more concerned with truth than lurking in the cesspool of their most idiotic and self-indulgent fantasies.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Fed Raises Specter of Class Struggle

World Socialist Website:

The US ruling elite is determined to do everything in its power to transfer its own enormous losses onto the backs of the American working class. The unlimited bailout power being called for by the Treasury and the Fed constitutes one part of this attempt. The systematic drive to slash real wages in order to finance the return to profitability constitutes another.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Russians Vote Stalin as “Face of the Nation”

Eh-oh! History is on our side!

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Hundreds of Super Rich Under Investigation

Thanks to the deeds of one disgruntled computer technician, who managed to steal banking information from his home country of Lichtenstein, which evidently has very secretive banking laws, hundreds of extremely wealthy U.S. citizens are now under investigation by federal prosecutors for tax evasion. Apparently, the giant Swiss Bank UBS may also have been complicit in helping to hide up to $20 billion. (Via The Consumerist.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Judas!

Daniel Miller, writing for The Nation, has recently published a “scathing critique” of Slavoj Žižek in general and his latest book, In Defense of Lost Causes, in particular, pointing to his pyrrhic descent into madness as indicated by the undoubtedly Hegelian trifecta of Hitchens-esque contrarianism, left-wing militarism and, of course, the culminating integration with hyper-reflexive late-capitalist consumerism. Miller concludes his review with this bit of speculative reason:

Throughout In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek speaks recurrently, and in a sometimes disturbingly extravagant tone, of the “messianic” imperative of performing “a Leap of Faith” over the ravine of common sense in pursuit of “lost Causes, Causes that, from the space of sceptical wisdom, cannot but appear as crazy.” During such moments, it’s hard not to suspect that Žižek has finally gone mad.

As a student of advanced theory, I don’t find any of this problematic. On the contrary, Miller’s reaction to Žižek’s “Kehre” typifies the kind of idolatry that surrounds innumerable public figures when the ego catches a glimpse of its own auratic reflection only to find itself spurned and alienated in the solipsistic idiocy of its own narcissistic jouissance.

Perhaps this gives some credibility to Rex Butler’s otherwise annoyingly stupid and culturally inept comparison of Žižek to Bob Dylan, only insofar as both succeeded in alienating large portions of their audience at a certain world-historical juncture. If this is the case, then I fully welcome Žižek’s theological turn and his advertisements for the BBC and Abercrombie & Fitch. If Miller represents the kind of audience Žižek had formerly captivated, then I eagerly await the sleeveless leather shirts and aviators to come.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 2 Comments